Thursday, February 26, 2009

Depending on the expression, I like to put the mouth on backwards. It makes a wacky expression look even wackier. They did this a few times in some of the earlier Simpsons seasons. Watching the Simpsons and seeing it on TV for the first time, the backward mouth really jumped out at me. I thought it was just the craziest thing I ever saw. And so I have been using it throughout the years wherever I could sneak it in.

Monday, February 23, 2009

This is a scene I worked on today. I really need to get a cintiq soon. I would do so much more traditional, albeit digital, animation with a cintiq, instead of using short cuts like symbols, libraries, and tweening. I did manage to get some decent action on his cape though. This is just a rough; once I get the voice recorded I will change the lip sync and get the right facial expressions to match the voice acting, and most importantly fix the timing. For now, the lip sync is just a place holder.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

One of the scenes I animated today. I am not using a standard, generic A to H mouth chart for this pilot or for this series. I want the acting, particularly in the lips syncs to be funnier, more specific to the dialog, and different from scene to scene. Most shows these days that use flash or toon boom have 2 sets of mouth charts in the library, happy A to H and Angry A to H, and ALL the lips syncs for ALL the scenes use only those mouth positions. Sure it makes for some very fast animation, but it's not acting, and it is not interesting. So I am creating several completely different lip syncs in every given scene, and then if it those lips work in another scene, I will reuse them. Eventually, as I animate more scenes and the library of lip positions grows, there will be increasingly less lips to have to be drawn. Most digital shows do this very same thing for hand positions such, so why not lips?